and I assume I need to change the Rapid Dial Phone book in the DPMA to none then create my xml doc to recreate the phone book with my desired Smart BLF settings?

I'm just unsure how to start setting up Smart BLF with the DPMA....

do I set blf_items=myblfitems.xml in /etc/asterisk/res_digium_phone_devices.conf? I assume I do this by manually editing the .conf as I see nothing about BLF in the DPMA... Then where do I set my new Contacts.xml doc to be used? Can I put my new xml files in the /etc/asterisk dir or do they need to be elsewhere?

The Digium Phones Addon for FreePBX doesn't currently provide any support for the Smart BLF stuffs. If you're using that to manage your Digium phones, it's going to overwrite any config file changes you're making under the hood.

With that in mind, you can either *not* use the Digium Phones Addon for FreePBX, in which case you'll have to make all of your res_digium_phone configuration file changes yourself (but which might be the simplest path) or you could hack up the Digium Phones Addon for FreePBX's php to allow you to configure blf items files.

Well that's rather disappointing. Are there plans to support Smart Blf? If I do decide to hack up the php my questions from the first post still apply as to what config files I need to edit. Do you know if anyone else has modified the DPMA before that may give me a head start?

There's no modifying of the DPMA involved. If you're using the Digium Phones Addon for FreePBX, it's in control of writing the DPMA configuration files - if you want it to write files differently, you have to modify it.

I hesitate to provide too much direction in this matter because I don't want to be on the hook for supporting PHP modifications.

Weather you would like to provide more information is of course up to you, and if its something you should not do then I do not want you to feel pressured at all. I quite like the Digium Phone addon simply because it speed up setting up phones so much! in the past all the phones I have used have needed extensive xml editing and that of course takes a long time. I have looked at the end point managed but it also has relatively imitated support for Smart BLF. If I can modify the php so phone setup can be done with the addon and I simply have to create my Smart BlF xml and corresponding phonebook (that will be the same across all phones) that still saves a ton of time setting up xml files.

if you are able to help me with this I would be grateful! if not I guess I'm on my own

Hello jdetmold, Did you by chance figure this one out?I have recently setup the phone system at work and got it into a working state for now, with plans to update it with more useful features down the line. Unfortunately I failed to read 1 page on here with the DPMA Features per platform. Specifically how unsupported AsteriskNow (FreeBPX) is with the DPMA.

If hacking the PHP is necessary then so be it but that's something I have not gotten into before.